Service quality dimensions perceived by film festival visitors

Abstract

Film festivals represent one of the most rapidly expanding areas of cultural events worldwide. While local communities and government agencies recognize film festivals as a means of promoting tourism, still dominantly regard them as a cultural activity. As a result, film festival organizers mainly focus on programming, while visitor services and visitor satisfaction at the film festivals have rarely been considered in film festival planning and management. Despite the importance of visitor satisfaction and service quality provided at the film festivals, little research has been done to understand how visitors perceive service quality in the film festival context. Thus, this study attempts to identify underlying dimensions of service quality and how service quality affects visitor satisfaction within the context of film festivals. We identified five factors as the most important dimensions of service quality within the film festivals: responsiveness, auxiliary amenities, quality of facilities, program content, and accessibility. The findings illustrated substantial differences in the relative importance of service quality dimensions in influencing the satisfaction when comparing local and nonlocal visitors. The results of the study provide useful insights into film festival organizers and destination marketers who are engaged in the process of planning and supporting film festival tourism for their communities. © 2011 Cognizant Comm. Corp.